nilay patel
@reckless.bsky.social
157K followers 509 following 3.5K posts
Editor-in-chief of The Verge, host of Decoder, cohost of The Vergecast. I am in love with spectacle.
Editor-in-chief of The Verge, host of Decoder, cohost of The Vergecast. I am in love with spectacle.
![We’ve had Sen. [Ron] Wyden on the show many times to talk about Section 230. I won’t go too far down that rabbit hole. The dynamic there was that Section 230 provided the immunity that you’re describing, but it was immunity for speech that would otherwise be illegal. And so it was speech that was defamatory. There’s a whole category of speech that isn’t illegal. Are you saying that taking the 230 immunity away from the social platforms would somehow make them moderate lawful but awful speech? And I bring this up because I’m very curious about how you would apply it in the AI case as well.
Yeah, no, I think that is the case. That part of their argument was, “ We want to take down really nasty, offensive, racist content, but we will be afraid to do so if you don’t give us immunity. So give us immunity, and we’ll take all that bad stuff down.” They got immunity. And I don’t know if you’ve been on X lately; it’s a cesspool. So giving them broad immunity did not allow them to enforce their community policies. And the First Amendment prohibits the government from dictating speech or prohibiting you from saying things. It doesn’t prohibit a private party from saying, “We don’t want racist content on our platform.” So there’s no problem with a private platform saying, “That violates our policy. We’re not going to post it.” And they’re not utilizing that immunity in a good way. So why should they continue to have it?
Now, we may want to create a safe harbor for companies that are meeting best practices and standards. So we may want to narrow 230 instead of getting rid of it. What is the analogy in terms of AI? I’m not sure what the analogy is.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:x56l2n7i7babgdzqul4bd433/bafkreih3fcl7yh42ospec32jebremfrn6suiwvkewomsgcxspqmsf3lf3y)
![We talk to developers all the time here at The Verge. They’re like, “Our entire job is different.” The world has changed. The market has cracked open. Something is going to happen there. Then, downstream of that, you can say, “Well we hired a bunch of engineers to build us business process automation. Maybe we get way more value out of those engineers and we get way more automation.” There’s something in the enterprise that’s going to happen with AI, that feels like I understand the value. Do you see any consumer applications of that scale beyond just telling Alexa to buy me shoes. Quite honestly, I don’t yet, apart from Google Search getting a lot weirder over the past two years.
I don’t have any great examples yet. You’re right. You are seeing some horizontal areas in the enterprise that are consistent across almost every company, like coding. Customer service is one that everybody’s working. You start to see some emerging horizontal use cases in legal. We’re seeing a lot of use cases in our people organization, too. I think those are pretty standard. Everybody’s at least aware of those opportunities. People are at different stages on the journey. But, I’m not the consumer expert by any stretch. We’re purely B2B, so that’s where I spend all my time.
If I saw it, I would have probably read it on something you published.
We’re looking for it every day.
The reason I’m asking is because I think this relates to why I started out asking about data centers in space. I’ve heard [Google CEO] Sundar Pichai say variations on this idea. Without the big consumer application that everybody understands and can see the benefit of, putting the data center in the backyard is becoming an increasingly harder sell. The power requirements, the water requirements — which I know are controversial and often argued about — just the energy, resources, and requirements of the data centers are making them unpopular.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:x56l2n7i7babgdzqul4bd433/bafkreictk44dwgik427snvix5qsabef5ct2fzccvczzu7pmiupj3hw4baa)
